Misadventures at 720nm

I finally finished out the rest of this series over the course of this afternoon:

I don’t make any excuse for being utterly humbled by some of the amazing work put out by the CICLOPS team using the Cassini space probe currently whirling its way around Saturn. The team have a particular eye for capturing artful arrangements of the gas giant’s many moons. In the last two weeks, however, images of the alignment of Enceladus' famed geysers with Titan and the planet’s rings have caused quite a stir. The two raw files in question are N00154028 and N00154034:

N00154028

N00154034

Spectacular photographs by themselves, the real wonder shines out when you combine them:

I eagerly await a finish, processed version of this scene, but in the meanwhile I have taken them and made use of Photoshop’s gradient tool:

I feel guilty, sorry guys, for giving you such a lame 365 image. Even as I looked at the cathedral shot and intuitively realized how I could improve upon it, I began bad for throwing up such an honestly bad shot. So, here, enjoy! The constellation of Draco, the Dragon. For reference, the north star, Polaris is just above (“north”) the top of this image.

I feel inordinately special because I picked out the constellation with an iPod app, (the K.I.S.S.-compatible) Stars. Its free and performs exactly as advertised. It shows you the constellations. When you combine it with Dana Peters’ Planets app (which can double as a solar compass in a pinch, you have a great, free way of finding out about the planets and stars at night.

…I just turned a photo-post into a sales pitch for two iPod apps. I guess I’m loving the iPod a whole bunch. And the stars, always the stars. The body of Draco is just a little to the right of center. The bright star to the left of centre is Alpha Cephei in the constellation Cepheus.

Think about it.

3634 seconds at ISO 200 and f/5.6 (EXIF for the curious)

(Obligatory shout-out to Irish photographers Shane Murphy and Elliot Tucker, who have been wetting their own feet on the ISS too.)

I’m at the stage in my astrophotography where every photograph is a valuable learning experience, although they mostly come out looking similar…same-ish? absolutely identical. Stars. Background noise. Some light spill from some random ambient light source. The above one-hour exposure has honestly been the longest I’ve pushed any given long exposure.

For all that the exposure is almost identical to several of my other efforts from the past week I’m still going to come out and argue it as an another learning experience. So nyah.

Space and astrophotography has hugely interested me ever since I was a little boy. At first the wonder came of the sheer unimaginable scope and wonder of these faraway worlds and stars – three of my strongest early childhood memories were the tragic Challenger accident, Sir Patrick Moore on (I believe) Channel 4 discussing the Giotto encounter with Halley’s Comet and watching the first live photographs broadcast during the extended coverage of Voyager 2′s 1989 flyby of Neptune. In all the 21 years since then my interest has only become keener and my wonder has only deepened as I began to truly appreciate the Herculean efforts involved in assembling the telescopes, launching the probes, coordinating the capture of signals and processing the discrete images into stunning photographs.

Think of it like this: You’re Ansel Adams capturing The Tetons and Snake River. Except you’re blindfolded, driving down the road at 25,000 kilometres per hours and setting the camera and composing the image on the direction of a person who’s sitting in a room halfway around the world and talking to you via a telephone.

For all this is maybe the most technically demanding field of photography, individual efforts is rarely noticed and lauded unless you get lucky. To you unknown astrophotographers – I salute you.

I am totally fecked tired. I started work on updating old side content at 11am yesterday. It involves moving to the next page (/page/2/, /page/3/ and so on) checking all the links work, all the images are formatted correctly and generating thumbnails for the new theme. With a few breaks tossed in I made it as far as page 33 before exhaustion overcame me. On top of that I vacuum cleaned the house, refilled the dishwasher, cleaned the counters, fed the cats (three times), went for a walk, went into Galway with my sister to see my mum, and did a ton of laundry. The unquestionable high-point of my day was listening to a birthday greeting from my little girl, courtesy of my wife.

Some birthday. :)

In the meanwhile I’ve had the camera set up outside taking 30 and 60-minute exposure star trails. It is an act of pure laziness on my part because I can walk inside, go back to work on the computer, come back at the specified time, swap out memory cards and come back inside to keep working in here.